Ben Frost's new piece The Wasp Factory is every bit as disturbing as the book it is based on.

He speaks here about working with a source text for the first time and his approach to composition, which incorporates noises as well as notes: "There's an inherent democracy in my approach to music making... I don't make the voice of a string quintet any more important than the hiss of a snake or the cracking of ice or the sound of fire."

The production is a co-production between HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Laura Berman_Next, Berlin, and The Royal Opera and Holland Festival in collaboration with Cork Midsummer Festival. It has been made possible by support from Capital Cultural Fund Berlin and Nordic Culture Point.

The Wasp Factory is a controversial novel. The Irish Times said of its publication, ‘it is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity’ and the Sunday Express described the book as ‘a silly, gloatingly sadistic and grisly yarn of a family of Scots lunatics.’ The Times Literary Supplement decided it was sensationalism in the face of the writer’s previous rejections: ‘the surest way to make an impact with a first novel, if not the most satisfactory, is to deal in extremes of oddity and unpleasantness.’ We have the benefit of hindsight.

In place of the Stalinist-style political control that Orwell saw as the undesirable endgame of European totalitarian socialism we see untrammelled freedom. Banks gives us a scenario in which a teenager with a tendency towards megalomania and an obsession with torturing animals roams free, unmonitored by any form of authority. We are shown what disturbed humans are capable of when nobody is watching.

Frank, the protagonist, is not a legally registered citizen (a sort of Orwellian ‘unperson’) and his father keeps him hidden from the authorities on a ‘nearly-island’ on the North Sea coast of Scotland. Frank’s dominion over the ‘island’ and its fauna is slightly ridiculous, recalling the imaginary war games many children play. But there is nothing ridiculous in his dispassionate and sadistic capacity for murder, nor in the family saga of abuse and neglect that is described in the margins of the story.

Paul Morley, in his programme article for Ben Frost’s opera (which received its premiere at Bregenz Festival this summer and gets its UK premiere in the Linbury from tonight) was keen to keep much of the plot concealed. He wrote, ‘it is best for the audience to know nothing about what is about to happen, other than they are where the action is, and one more crazed thing leads to another, to more and more change, until there is, incredibly, nowhere else to go.’ We are presented with the story of a dangerously cunning sociopath who, left to his own devices, commits barely believable transgressions of what we might sentimentally (nostalgically?) call ‘conscience’. Few in today’s national climate would accept that it is best they ‘know nothing’ and let one crazed thing lead to another.

If The Wasp Factory struck a keynote in the early eighties, Banks’s seventh novel, Complicity (1993), pursues the tune. Margaret Thatcher's government spanned the decade that separates the two books and Complicity describes a series of sadistic murders committed in retribution for the victims’ selfish exploitation of the permissiveness of the Thatcher years. Banks’s response to Thatcher’s death in April 2013, two months before his own, was to comment that while he was respectful, her ‘baleful influence on British politics remains undiminished.’ His strong feelings go some way towards explaining the tone of these two shocking novels that bookended the Thatcher decade. Thatcher’s keenness to free the British economy from state control and the stranglehold of the unions could be seen as partly responsible for the barbarity of unregulated enterprise that has proceeded at the expense of other forms of freedom. Banks certainly saw degeneration and savagery in the societal changes linked to the free market of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In the wake of the Cold War and in the name of democracy, the project to avert an Orwellian nightmare has failed to take responsible precautions against the proliferation of simple, unconscionable selfishness. The Wasp Factory can be read as an allegory of what happens when sociopaths are allowed to wreak unbridled dominion over a small island. Perhaps rather than (or as well as) a sensationalist novel that launched the career of a highly political writer, The Wasp Factory is a leveled caution of the Orwellian kind.

The Wasp Factory runs from 2 – 8 October 2013 in the Linbury Studio Theatre. A limited number of tickets are still available.The production is staged with support from Capital Cultural Fund Berlin and Nordic Culture Point.

The Royal Opera has announced artistic plans for more than 15 new works to be presented from 2013 to 2020, both on the Main Stage and in the Linbury Studio Theatre.

Director of Opera Kasper Holten and Music Director Antonio Pappano plan to extend the established tradition of commissioning British composers as well as work by leading international artists.

Kasper Holten commented: “New work is not and should not be at the periphery of our programme, but right at the core of what and who we are. And this is something we do, not because we must, but because it is something that we are passionate about. We hope that opera audiences will share our curiosity and come with us with open minds along this journey.”

Antonio Pappano added: “Our efforts are being focused on working with the composers who really excite us, both for the Linbury Studio Theatre and for the main stage. We have worked hard to find the composers we feel have a real flair and passion for opera, and we are very excited about being able to roll out our vision for new work on all scales.”

2012/13 will see the UK stage premiere in the Linbury for Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Ramin Gray, alongside the UK premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin and the revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur.

Also presented in the 2013/14 Season will be a Christmas opera for family audiences by Julian Philips and directed by Natalie Abrahami; two new pieces inspired by the Faust legend, one by British electronic composer Matthew Herbert, and the other by composer Luke Bedford and playwright David Harrower; the first UK performances of renowned Italian composer Luca Francesconi’s Quartett (a new version directed by John Fulljames and co-produced with London Sinfonietta and Opéra de Rouen after the piece’s 2010 premiere at La Scala, Milan); and the first of an annual collaboration with Aldeburgh Music and Opera North to commission first operas from young composers.

2014/15

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole will return to the Main Stage, followed by a new opera in the Linbury by Philip Glass, based on Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The opera is a co-commission with Music Theatre Wales, Theater Magdeburg and Scottish Opera. Also commissioned for the Linbury is a new chamber opera by German/Danish composer Søren Nils Eichberg and librettist Hannah Dübgen. The opera is a taut thriller, which asks us to question what we can really trust – which emotions are real and which are virtual.

2015-19

Future plans include a new opera for children by Mark-Anthony Turnage and directed by Katie Mitchell in the Linbury; an adaptation of Max Frisch’s play Count Oederland by Judith Weir and librettist Ben Power, a collaboration with Scottish Opera and Oper Frankfurt; a Main Stage commission with Deutsche Oper Berlin from German composer Georg Friedrich Haas based on John Fosse’s novel Morgon og Kveld (Morning and Evening) premiering at Covent Garden in November 2015; a new opera in Spring 2017 from Thomas Adès based on Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel with libretto by Tom Cairns, who also directs; another major Main Stage commission in Spring 2018; and an adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass by Unsuk Chin and librettist David Henry Hwang for the main stage in the 2018/19 Season.

2020

The Royal Opera will challenge leading European composers Kaija Saariaho (Finland), Mark-Anthony Turnage (UK), Luca Francesconi (Italy) and Jörg Widmann (Germany) to create large scale new operas. The vision is for four distinct operas, each one in part inspired by the composer’s response to a set of questions developed in collaboration with the philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “What preoccupies us today? How do we represent ourselves on stage? What are the collective myths of our present and future?”

Other commissions include work by Chris Mayo, Sasha Siem and Soumik Datta, as well as by digital artists Kleis&Rønsholdt and Tal Rosner. The current 2012/13 Season will see composers David Bruce and Elspeth Brooke take up positions as Composers in Residence.

As well as staged work, from 2013 The Royal Opera has developed new relationships with Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Sound and Music as well as collaborating in the future with all large-scale regional companies and working with mid-scale touring companies. Covent Garden will also invest in a programme of opera development including workshops and readings, both public and in-house.